Researchers have managed to eavesdrop on cell phone voice conversations by using radar to detect vibrations. It’s more a proof of concept than anything else. The radar detector is only ten feet away, the setup is stylized, and accuracy is poor. But it’s a start. [...]
Here’s the story. The commenters on X (formerly Twitter) are unimpressed. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Blog moderation policy. [...]
Porn sites are hiding code in.svg files: Unpacking the attack took work because much of the JavaScript in the.svg images was heavily obscured using a custom version of “JSFuck,” a technique that uses only a handful of character types to encode JavaScript into a camouflaged wall of …
Here’s an interesting story about a failure being introduced by LLM-written code. Specifically, the LLM was doing some code refactoring, and when it moved a chunk of code from one file to another it changed a “break” to a “continue.” That turned an error logging statement into an …
There is a really great series of online events highlighting cool uses of AI in cybersecurity, titled Prompt||GTFO. Videos from the first three events are online. And here’s where to register to attend, or participate, in the fourth. Some really great stuff here. [...]
The NSA and GCHQ have jointly published a history of World War II SIGINT: “ Secret Messengers: Disseminating SIGINT in the Second World War.” This is the story of the British SLUs (Special Liaison Units) and the American SSOs (Special Security Officers). [...]
A few years ago, scammers invented a new phishing email. They would claim to have hacked your computer, turned your webcam on, and videoed you watching porn or having sex. BuzzFeed has an article talking about a “shockingly realistic” variant, which includes photos of you and your house—more …
Fears around children is opening up a new market for automatic license place readers. [...]
In a rare squid/security combined post, a new vulnerability was discovered in the Squid HTTP proxy server. [...]
Google’s vulnerability finding team is again pushing the envelope of responsible disclosure: Google’s Project Zero team will retain its existing 90+30 policy regarding vulnerability disclosures, in which it provides vendors with 90 days before full disclosure takes place, with a 30-day period allowed for patch adoption …
The government of China has accused Nvidia of inserting a backdoor into their H20 chips: China’s cyber regulator on Thursday said it had held a meeting with Nvidia over what it called “serious security issues” with the company’s artificial intelligence chips. It said US AI experts had …
Earlier this week, the Trump administration narrowed export controls on advanced semiconductors ahead of US-China trade negotiations. The administration is increasingly relying on export licenses to allow American semiconductor firms to sell their products to Chinese customers, while keeping the most powerful of them out of the hands of …
Skechers is making a line of kid’s shoes with a hidden compartment for an AirTag. [...]
An Arizona woman was sentenced to eight-and-a-half years in prison for her role helping North Korean workers infiltrate US companies by pretending to be US workers. From an article : According to court documents, Chapman hosted the North Korean IT workers’ computers in her own home between October 2020 and …
What scientists thought were squid fossils were actually arrow worms. [...]
Airportr is a service that allows passengers to have their luggage picked up, checked, and delivered to their destinations. As you might expect, it’s used by wealthy or important people. So if the company’s website is insecure, you’d be able to spy on lots of wealthy …
Peter Gutmann and Stephan Neuhaus have a new paper —I think it’s new, even though it has a March 2025 date—that makes the argument that we shouldn’t trust any of the quantum factorization benchmarks, because everyone has been cooking the books: Similarly, quantum factorisation is performed …
“Who’s winning on the internet, the attackers or the defenders?” I’m asked this all the time, and I can only ever give a qualitative hand-wavy answer. But Jason Healey and Tarang Jain’s latest Lawfare piece has amassed data. The essay provides the first framework for metrics …
Looks serious. [...]
Bluesky thread. Here’s the paper, from 1957. Note reference 3. [...]
Chinese hackers are exploiting a high-severity vulnerability in Microsoft SharePoint to steal data worldwide: The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-53770, carries a severity rating of 9.8 out of a possible 10. It gives unauthenticated remote access to SharePoint Servers exposed to the Internet. Starting Friday, researchers began warning of …
Yet another SQUID acronym: “ Stable Quasi-Isodynamic Design.” It’s a stellarator for a fusion nuclear power plant. [...]
Today’s freaky LLM behavior : We study subliminal learning, a surprising phenomenon where language models learn traits from model-generated data that is semantically unrelated to those traits. For example, a “student” model learns to prefer owls when trained on sequences of numbers generated by a “teacher” model that prefers …
The current state of digital identity is a mess. Your personal information is scattered across hundreds of locations: social media companies, IoT companies, government agencies, websites you have accounts on, and data brokers you’ve never heard of. These entities collect, store, and trade your data, often without your …
The current state of digital identity is a mess. Your personal information is scattered across hundreds of locations: social media companies, IoT companies, government agencies, websites you have accounts on, and data brokers you’ve never heard of. These entities collect, store, and trade your data, often without your …